Hot hot hot: Deepal Shaw plays an earthquake victim turned pornstar in Kalyug

 

Kalyug

It is based on my idea. Two things hit me. One, the staggering data of cyber porn being a 56 billion dollar industry. In America, the American Public Service Broadcast has a big role in spreading porn. Big and respected business houses are involved in this trade including AT&T, Marriott and General Motors. The who?s who of the American establishment are part of the porn racket.

Secondly, the whole Internet explosion in India has been spearheaded by pornography. And now with broadband, transmission of pornographic images is very easy. You now get rape videos everywhere from Palikabazaar to interior Uttar Pradesh. Then you have honeymoons being captured on video in the name of reality pornography. And the total powerlessness of an Indian since all the servers are abroad. We don?t have the teeth to fight back.

So, with this reality in our hands, we decided to make fiction out of fact. We have this guy, played by Kunal Khemu, who takes the audience through the whole journey. He comes from a Kashmiri pandit family who is uprooted and lands up in Mumbai. Making ends meet somehow, he falls in love with a young Jammu girl. Then their personal intimate moments become fodder for the porn industry. Here the Kashmiri angle is inspired from the Anara Gupta case.

The whole porn racket is traced to a powerful woman in Zurich, played by Amrita Singh, who serves the Indian diaspora legitimately. In European hotels, porn sells more than alcohol and other in-room snacks. Through Deepal Shaw, we have brought in the human trafficking angle. She plays a victim of the Gujarat earthquake. When the government aid runs out, people there sell the women of the house. Now, prostitution is pass?. Images of copulation sell more than actual flesh. Sometimes it?s done by force, sometimes after drugging the victims.

On the international map, Asian women are now the most sought-after creatures. An Asian woman is one of the biggest pornstars in the US. So the film explores how to handle this bizarre pervasive world. Kalyug?s got a lot of vitality, it makes you uncomfortable, disturbs you. But then we believe that movies should not have a look of edification. They should be sugar-coated pills with something serious in them.

Holiday

If Kalyug looks at the recent struggles of the middle class, Holiday is about the affluent world. It?s a completely new space that Pooja?s created, where she is brilliant. The basic graph of the film is from Dirty Dancing, about a family going on a vacation. What we have added is the burden of brilliance. It rejects the external impositions and the myth that what you must do is acceptable.

The film is about breaking away. The girl in the film, played by newcomer Onjolee Nair, doesn?t hide herself under a heap of cosmetics. It is very autobiographical. Pooja all her life has rejected everything she hasn?t liked. All her life she wanted acceptance from Mahesh Bhatt. Now, she has rejected all my influences and come into her own.

Blood lines: Pooja Bhatt, Ankur Desai and Dino Morea hang out on the sets of Holiday in Goa

To me, Holiday is about a simple theme ? no child can be a child forever and no parent can be a parent forever. You have to let her go at some point of time. So, this holiday, the girl discovers herself. The tagline goes: Come, fall in love... with yourself.

It is about the extraordinariness of ordinary people, the celebration of the common. How long do you want a painted Kareena Kapoor or a made-up Aishwarya Rai or a perfect Bipasha Basu? These role models are burdens on young girls. They are so put up to boost the cosmetic industry. Then again, it?s not anti-pleasure or anti-fun.

The others

Gangster: Anurag Basu is currently shooting the film based on Abu Salem and Monica Bedi in South Korea. It stars Shiney Ahuja, Emraan Hashmi and a new girl named Kangana.

Actress: After Kalyug, Mohit Suri will direct this film. It is a harsh unflinching look at the entertainment industry ? the madness, the suicides, the abortions, the debauchery, the one-upmanship...

Lahera: Irrfan and Emraan Hashmi star in this adaptation of Colatteral, to be shot entirely in Dubai. The story is played out in the Indian diaspora.

Friends: Told against the backdrop of the Asian community in the UK, the film will be shot in places like Bradford and Birmingham.

Suicide Bomber: To be directed by Anurag again, the film is about this guy, who?s supposed to be involved in the 7/7 blasts. But he doesn?t succeed in the operation and then life catches up with him. He finally does blow himself up, not against life but for life. This film will launch my son Rahul.